Regolith AWG July Recap: Mtg Recording, Laura Fackrell on Simulant Selection and Sterilization, OSD-476, PlantTheMoon Curation

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Hello @RegolithAWG members,

Here is the recap from our July 15 monthly meeting. About 30 members joined (not bad with only ~40 who actually have joined!). Three first-timers introduced themselves and Laura Fackrell gave a tour de force talk on regolith simulants that opened into a strong discussion on sterilization, fidelity, and plant growth.

Watch the full meeting recording.

New members. Ravinderjit Kaur Sandhu and Dimitri Huin-Sesnis join from the plant biology research institute at the Montréal Botanical Garden (Université de Montréal), both starting work on plant germination and growth in regolith simulants. Sonal Bajpai joins from the Brain AWG and brings a background in electrochemistry. As some may know there is a VERY cool Regolith AWG → Brain AWG collaboration already bearing fruit :slight_smile: Welcome, all.

The new Regolith AWG Communications Coordinator is Aengus Denvir, at Texas A&M. Thank you for stepping up and welcome Aengus! @adenvir adenvir@tamu.edu

Projects and sub-groups (our main ask). We are shaping the group’s first project threads and want you on them. Two are moving now: PlantTheMoon data and curation (Borja Barbero, Ryan Scott, and Andrew Palmer), a push to curate high-quality, richly annotated plant-in-regolith datasets to OSDR/GeneLab standards so they stay transparent, reproducible, and both human-readable and AI-agent accessible; and lunar mapping for plant-relevant regolith information. A cross-cutting need also came up: as we curate more simulant datasets, we need subject-matter-expert review of the metadata templates, including study-design variables and simulant storage metadata, so the data stays interoperable. Reach out to Borja and/or Jared CC’d if interested. and browse current threads on the AWG Subgroup Project Master Table. Keep project discussion on the AWG Forum-Space (posting paper, opportunities, ideas) so it stays open to everyone.

Featured talk, worth the watch. Laura Fackrell walked through regolith simulants around two questions: how to select the right one, and what to do with it once you have it. The work she presented was done with Andrew Palmer (Florida Tech), Jared Long-Fox, and others.

  • Selecting a simulant. No simulant reproduces a real body perfectly. Lunar simulants fall into highland (anorthositic) and mare (basaltic) types (MLS-1, JSC-1A, NU-LHT, LHS-1), while Mars has only a handful of standardized options (JSC Mars-1, Mojave Mars Simulant/MMS, and the more recent Mars Global Simulant/MGS-1). Properties that are hard to reproduce, including reduced and nanophase iron, agglutinates, abrasiveness, perchlorates, and salt profiles, mean a simulant can “simulate the Moon or Mars” without simulating what your study actually needs.
  • What is living in it. Simulants are not sterile. Autoclaving (121°C, roughly 30 minutes) sterilizes small volumes well but does not penetrate compacted bulk, so interiors stay viable even after 1.5 hours. Sterilization also shifts bulk mineralogy by minor-to-moderate amounts under XRD, mostly hydration-state changes in salts and clays; LHS-1 stayed largely unchanged.
  • Getting DNA out. Simulant is a low-biomass, chemically difficult substrate. A high-concentration, high-pH phosphate buffer step markedly improved yield from a Qiagen PowerSoil Pro kit, with nanopore sequencing chosen for accessibility.
  • Takeaway. Handling matters as much as selection: material grows once it has something to feed on, storage conditions shape results, and small-volume sterilization is the reliable route. Laura will post her simulant references and the source DNA-extraction protocol on the Forum-Space.

Contact: l.e.fackrell@gmail.com. Watch the recording.

Discussion and community highlights.

  • OSD-476 in focus. Ryan surfaced OSD-476, which grew Arabidopsis thaliana in actual Apollo 11, 12, and 17 regolith with RNA-seq and photography. Its protocols hold a real regolith-water result: Apollo 17 wetted by capillary action like the JSC-1A controls, while Apollo 11 and 12 were hydrophobic and had to be actively stirred to wet, which matters for any lunar water-delivery system. No quantitative water metadata was captured as queryable fields, which fed the group’s metadata-standards point above.
  • Simulant fidelity. Aenghus Denvir (Texas A&M) pressed on how well “global” Mars simulants represent Mars and pointed to a recently submitted paper on simulant accuracy. Batch-to-batch variation in both chemistry and physical behavior came up repeatedly as a confound for biology.
  • Antioxidant washes. For regolith plant growth, Borja’s Frontiers in Plant Science paper on proline and ascorbate washes was shared.
  • Bridging to the lunar-surface community. Several members flagged the thin biology-and-health presence at the Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium (LSIC) and the Space Resources Round Table, and noted openness from their leads to grow biology and health collaboration. That is an opening this AWG can move into.

References and resources shared in chat.

Looking ahead.

Resources: Meeting Recording | Forum-Space | Regolith AWG Group Member Hub | AWG About | AWG Calendar | Sub-Group Master Table | General AWG Join Form

Cheers,
-Ryan, on behalf of the Regolith AWG co-leads (@borjabarbero & @lunar_long-fox )

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